Cosmogenesis (3) : Time and Creation

Time and Creation

In any discussion of the creation of the world the paradoxical and complex question of temporality inevitably arises. If the Creation is regarded as an event, it must have taken place at some point in time, on a specific date. If time is regarded as a linear phenomenon, as it is in the Western world, this necessarily raises the problem whether anything existed before the Creation and, if so, what. But if time itself existed before the Creation, it cannot be part of the world as we know it – something which is difficult to imagine…

A Treatise on the Hexameron. St Ambrose (c. 339-394), who was bishop of Milan, was a believer in “Platonic Christianity” and one of the first Church Fathers, along with Origen and St Basil, to deliver sermons on the six days of the Creation, which he collected into a treatise. His Hexameron (shown here in an 11th century manuscript copy) is more than an exegesis; it is a veritable encyclopaedia anticipating those of the Middle Ages: the third book is concerned with plants, the fifth with birds and fish, and the second part of the sixth book with the anatomy of the human body.Paris, BNF, Manuscripts, Lat. 1720.

This paradox was pondered by Medieval scholars, who were forced to conclude that the world and time were created simultaneously. In the fourth century the Bishop of Milan, St Ambrose, wrote in his Hexameron: “In the beginning of time, therefore, God created heaven and earth. Time proceeds from this world, not before the world.”[1]. In the early 13th century the French philosopher and theologian William of Auvergne (also known as William of Paris) pursued a similar line of reasoning in his thinking about time: “Just as there is nothing beyond or outside the World, since it contains and includes all things, so there is nothing before or preceding time, which began with the creation of the World, since it contains all the periods of which it is comprised. This poses the question: What was before the beginning of time? or, since the word ‘before’ implies the existence of time, In the time preceding the beginning of time, did anything exist?”[2]

The same questions continue to be asked today, and scientists who are asked to give public lectures on big bang theory and the expansion of the universe commonly face two kinds of questions: “What was there before the big bang?” and “What is there for the universe to expand into?” – in other words “Did time exist before time began?” and “Is there space beyond the limit of space?” The solution of modern physics to these paradoxes is that the universe consists of space-time and therefore the creation of the world cannot be regarded as a temporal phenomenon.

But before the development of quantum physics it was not possible to consider the origin of the universe from anything other than a temporal viewpoint. In the context of the Christian Creation story, for example, one of the fundamental questions was: did God create the world instantaneously or in stages? The various accounts of the Creation in the scriptures invite two different answers. The more widely accepted interpretation is that the Creation took place over six days (Hexameron), followed by a day of rest. The theological aspects of pre-18th century Western cosmology derive in large part from the ancient hexamerons, commentaries on Genesis by the early Church Fathers. In the fourth century AD one of the greatest of these, St Basil of Caesarea, maintained that each day of the Creation corresponded to a normal day – i.e. the 24 hours between successive passages of the sun across the meridian – whereas, according to Psalm 90, “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday”[3].

The Six Days of the Creation

This XIVth century manuscript is an unusual combination of missal and book of hours. Among its 72 miniatures are six depicting separately each stage of the hexameron according to the traditional belief in a temporal Creation. The painter belonged to the flourishing artistic community of Lombardy c. 1385-90. BNF, Manuscripts, Lat. 757.

The other interpretation of the bible story, that the Creation was instantaneous, was upheld in particular by Philo of Alexandria[4], a contemporary of Jesus, and by Origen[5], like Philo a native of Alexandria, in the third century. How else could time have started before the appearance, on the fourth day, of the two great “astronomical clocks”, the sun and the moon? Philo’s argument was that, since a day is defined in terms of the passage of the sun across the sky, there could not have been any “days” of Creation before God made the sun. This concept of an instantaneous Creation can be seen as an attempt to escape if not a belief in temporality (this could hardly have been imagined at the time), at least its astronomical implications. In doing so these early philosophers anticipated certain aspects of modern cosmology, which, despite having more sophisticated means of recording time at its disposal, is still limited by them: since 1967 the duration of a second has been officially defined in terms of the radiation from caesium 133, but no such “natural clock” could have survived the extreme temperature and intense energy of the early universe; besides, caesium had not yet been “created”…

A few Christian philosophers attempted to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of the Creation. St Thomas Aquinas[6], for example, argued that God had created the substance of things in an instant, but that he had taken six full days to accomplish the more complex task of separating, shaping and perfecting that substance. Once again this idea seems to anticipate modern thinking: according to big bang theory the history of the universe begins with the appearance of an entity called matter-space-time, which is followed by the separation of different particles (quark era, hadron era, radiation era, etc.). But, although modern cosmological theories can account for the gradual formation of matter, from that indeterminate “quark soup” to complex structures like planets, stars and galaxies, they are still unable to describe adequately the origin of the universe.

The Seven Ages of the World. The illustrations to The Book of the Seven Ages of the World, written in around 1460 by a pupil of Jacques Pilavaine in Mons, are attributed to Simon Marmion (c. 1425-89), who was known as the Master of Colour. This picture shows the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; seated on a throne in the sky, God is surrounded by choirs of angels and by circles representing the stages in His Creation. By incorporating these stages into a single panorama, Marmion suggests that the story of Genesis describes an instantaneous Creation, as interpreted by Philo of Alexandria and Origen. Le Livre des Sept Âges du Monde, late 15th century. Brussels, Albert I Royal Library, Manuscripts 9047

The distinction between origination and creation was made as long ago as the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, who believed that the concept of creation could be explained rationally, whereas origination could be understood neither scientifically nor philosophically. “We may believe that there was a beginning to the World, but we can neither prove it nor explain it,” he wrote in his Summa Theologiae of 1266-73. In another work (De AeternitateMundi) he even refuted the argument that the world had begun at a particular time and defended the possibility that the universe, although it had been created, was eternal. Other medieval thinkers took up this idea. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-80), for example, maintained in his Physica that “the beginning of the World was not a physical act of creation and cannot be proven as such.”

Such questions continue to exercise the minds of cosmologists everywhere, albeit within the very different conceptual framework of big bang theory. This theory is often wrongly believed to describe the origin of the universe. In fact, although it does account for the evolution of the universe from soon after its birth (estimated to have been about 13.8 billion years ago), it does not claim to be able to envisage a “zero time”, nor a fortiori the moment of creation or the origin of the universe. The extreme conditions out of which space, time, light and matter must have arisen remain beyond the reach of scientific investigation, since at the theoretical “zero time” the temperature would have been at infinity and modern physics is incapable of describing any interaction occurring at more than 1032 degrees kelvin (known as Planck temperature). The energy generated at higher temperatures is such that quantum laws would take place at the very core of the structure of space-time, making it impossible to calculate the physical effects of that activity within any current theory. There is thus a “barrier” preventing us from uncovering the history of the universe beyond a certain point; our understanding cannot reach “zero time” but is limited to the end of Planck time, 10-43 seconds later. In fact those first instants in the life of the universe are best described in terms of energy and temperature rather than time.

The Emergence of Light: Cosmic Background Radiation. Cosmic background radiation, which can be detected at microwave wavelengths (1-300 mm), emanates from all parts of the sky and is believed to be the remnants of the radiation emitted by the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago. It is the oldest electromagnetic radiation that can be directly “observed”, since for the first 380,000 years of its existence the universe was opaque and absorbed all radiation. In this image of the whole sky, taken at a frequency of 31 gigahertz and a wavelength of 9.5 mm by the COBE satellite in 1990, the different colours indicate variations in temperature but, once adjustments have been made for aberrations (caused by the movement of the earth and the Milky Way), the background can be seen to be virtually uniform.NASA / COBE

I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered.

To set foot on the soil of the asteroids, to lift by hand a rock from the Moon, to observe Mars from a distance of several tens of kilometers, to land on its satellite or even on its surface, what can be more fantastic? From the moment of using rocket devices a new great era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament. ­

I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe. Jorge luis Borges, The Aleph (1949)